Flint Dille interview, Co-writer of "Transformers: The Game" Options

[Tim Finn]

Flint Dille has a long history of writing for television, feature films, and video games. He first worked on the Transformers property in 1985, joining the production team at Sunbow Entertainment as a producer and story editor, as well as writing the Season 3 kick-off miniseries “Five Faces of Darkness.” With Ron Friedman and Jay Bacal, Dille wrote “Transformers: The Movie,” and recently contributed to a commentary track and an on-camera interview as bonus features for Sony Wonder’s 20th Anniversary edition of the movie on DVD. This interview was conducted by telephone on 12 June 2007 and was copy edited by myself.

-Tim Finn



TF: Are you freelance or are you working for a company?

FD: Basically everything I’m doing is for various different people. Just got done doing “Transformers” and “Fantastic Four” for this summer and working on a bunch of stuff I can’t talk about for next summer.

TF: How long did you work on “Transformers: The Game” from start to finish?

FD: I’d say about a year.

TF: And how did that first come about?

FD: The producer of the game at Activision, Dan Suarez, is a guy we’d worked with on a bunch of projects when he was at VUG—“Riddick: Butcher Bay.” He called me up one afternoon and he said “Is it true you wrote the Transformers movie?” I said “yeah, why?” He said “Man, we’re doing the game. Let’s do this.” So that was the beginning of it.

TF: How often does a job you do twenty years ago come back like this to reward you with another job anyway?

FD: What’s funny is it’s more often than you think. This year a pulp website is reprinting Agent 13, novels I wrote right around the time I wrote “Transformers.”

TF: That was some of the TSR stuff, right? That was related to the Top Secret role-playing game?

FD: Yeah, Agent 13 was just kind of our own thing. Dave Marconi and I wrote it and then we later tied it in with Top Secret. And then I think the first novel ended up shipping with Top Secret and they did game modules and stuff like that for us. Pretty cool.

TF: Besides writing this Transformers game, what were your responsibilities?

FD: That was really it. It was writing, we had a little bit of input into design. I know in production it’s morphed a lot and who knows how much of our stuff we’ll see? And that just means I honestly don’t know. I haven’t seen the latest of it. With video games, it’s moreso than with movie or TV, things just change. And you wait until you get it and you see it and you say “Oh, good, stuff’s in there.” “Ooh, no, it’s not there.”

TF: So you’ve not seen the game?

FD: I’ve seen the trailer for the game. We had a great event over at Cinespace where they screened the old movie and the Aint It Cool News guys were there and a bunch of game press was there to screen the old movie and we talked about it on stage for awhile. So I saw the latest trailer for the game but they are being incredibly tight-lipped about it. As people always are when games come out. There’s nothing to read into that. It’s top secret like the movie.

TF: So this bit where Frank Welker reprises the role of Megatron for the game but Hugo Weaving is playing Megatron in the movie, you didn’t have anything to do with that?

FD: Obviously my bias was always to get the original guys in there, I mean, Frank Welker-- Guy’s got the most amazing voice anybody’s ever heard. He’s a genius. Who wouldn’t want Welker in anything? When asked our opinion we made it abundantly clear that [we definitely vote for guys like] Michael Bell and Frank Welker, and unfortunately Chris Latta’s dead. But get as many of the original guys back as you could.

TF: How do you actually write a game based on a movie?

FD: Nobody wants to play a game that beat for beat follows the movie. That’s not the first instinct. Sometimes it works. Usually you have to add a lot of stuff, you have to change it, you have to build on the world of the movie. And really the decision gets to be are we doing a sequel to the movie? Are we doing a prequel to the movie? Are we doing a paralleloquy?

In other words, we sort of follow the beats of the movie but we then have a lot of adventures that happen in between. Like “Superman [Returns”], the idea was these were sort of the adventures they couldn’t tell you about in the movie because they had to tell you the high points of the movie. They didn’t bother to tell you that Superman was hijacked and went to Warworld on the way back to Earth. That’s a paralleloquy.

TF: What challenges are unique to writing a Transformers game?

FD: Writing a Transformers game to be honest with you isn’t that hard. You want to be careful to let the movie be the movie and yet pay homage to it. You’ve got vehicles who are robots and characters. They have relationships that have been well established. It’s not really that tough. Sometimes the problems—and this gets way more technical than you want to hear about—really get to how do you service the particular design of the game in a narrative context? And that you just figure out as you go on.

TF: Were you the only writer?

FD: No, John Zuur Platten wrote stuff with me, and there was a guy at the developer who did some fill in, and I don’t know who that was, somebody over in England. But John and I do a lot of game writing together.

TF: But that third person was somebody after your writing stage?

FD: Yeah.

TF: How many drafts does a game script go through?

FD: It totally depends on the script. That’s not an evasive answer. Movies-- every project’s different, but games are even moreso because there are two whole dimensions you don’t have with movies or with TV shows where you have this whole technical dimension where you have to figure out technically what you can accomplish and can’t accomplish, and then there a game dimension to it.

That having been said, usually you’ll get an idea of the levels of the game and you write the beats of the story. And when everybody’s agreed on the beats—and the beats are the smallest increments of action that you can get to from beginning to end of the story. The stuff that matters dramatically, not just every gamplay beat, but what matters dramatically. And then you build that up to an outline, and then you build that up to a first draft of the script and you get notes on that, and you polish the script. And usually there’s a whole draft which is incidental dialogue, and that’s often something like twenty ways of saying “Let’s get out of here.”

After the incidental dialogue draft usually things have to be scaled back or you get new things you need that they hadn’t thought of. In the best of all worlds you kind of do a spotting session where you go through the gameplay of the game and you throw in dialogue where you’re looking at the actual, physical reality of the game. It’d be like the changes you do to the actual script on the day of shooting. The best way to describe game scripting writing is it’s very, very iterative. Meaning you do a lot of different versions of it. It just kind of grows and changes and morphs and you keep going at it. It’s not like any one draft is usually that huge of a rewrite, but it is ten small rewrites.

Games are long, incremental engagements. It’s not like a movie where you have this moment where “Okay, on December 12th, you start your draft and it must be turned in by March 1st.” It’s not like that. You kind of start generating ideas, and then you’re reading a document, and you start merging your ideas with the document. And then there’s usually this brief, intense period of writing where you do the first draft. And that’s usually done in three or four weeks. And everybody knows you’re gonna go back to it a number of times.

By the way, John Platten and I also wrote a book about game writing that’s coming out in in January. It’s called “Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design.”

TF: Is that the publisher’s title or your title?

FD: That’s the publisher’s title. That was actually a previous publisher’s title. Our publisher halfway through the project was sold to another publisher and this kind of went along with it.

TF: This is your first book in a while, right?

FD: This is my first non-fiction book ever. The only other book I’ve had anything to do with in a long time was that novelization of [the game] “Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu.” That was a couple years ago with Devin Grayson, and she did the lion’s share of the novel adaptation, that’s for sure.

TF: You and I talked in 2002 when you were working for Infogrames and you were thinking about trying to get a Transformers game there, partially because of your interest and partially because of the Hasbro relationship with Infogrames. Does this game owe anything in a timeline of development to that, or are they completely separate?

FD: Totally, utterly, 100% separate.

TF: This came about because the movie was coming up.

FD: This is a game based on the movie. This is in the world of and loosely follows the story of the movie. The way you think of this game is it’s a companion piece for this movie.

TF: Anything you can tease about the game?

FD: I’m sure the trailer’s available on some website at this point and I take my NDAs [Non-Disclosure Agreements] very seriously and really can’t say anything beyond that other than it’s done by the same guys who did Star Wars Lego, so these guys are coming off a hit.

[ChessPieceFace]

I'm sorry I missed this thread on Thursday! Thank you for sharing this excellent interview.

[Tim Finn]

You're welcome. Though I hope the early reviews of the game somehow are not indicative of its quality. I want it to rock.

-Tim Finn

[Prime 2.0]

Hum, next time anyone sees Flint Dille tell him Prime 2.0 wants to know why Prime ordered Jazz to destroy stuff, and why Ratchet was completely written out of the story except for one line in the whole game?